FSFE Newsletter - December 2010

This edition covers the current developments in Open Standards policy, some
basic information about software patents, an update from FSCONS about
distributed computing, and how you can support us in the end of the year.

Software patents: Not another monopoly on software

To begin with, a patent is a monopoly on an idea, whereas copyright is a
monopoly on a concrete implementation. While Bach's II symphony is covered by
copyright, a patent would give a monopoly on the idea to combine bowed and wind
instruments. Software falls under the copyright. This makes sense, with
software you have little research costs, but you have to spend a lot of time
implementing the ideas
to make sure there are no security problems, and you can easily maintain and
adapt it in future. The idea to combine bowed and wind instruments is not a big
challenge, the challenge is how to combine them so it still sounds good in the
end.

The companies have to spent more money for their legal department, to
register patents, to negotiate patent crosslicensing, and to defend
themselves against patent claims. While for some time software patents are a
nice tool for big companies to prevent newcomers to compete with them, they
also have to face companies who only sue others on software patents, and
never do any software development by themselves. Against them, any software
company can only loose.

For software developers software patents mean legal uncertainty: whenever you
start programming you might violate law. You will never be able to find out
if you violate a patent. Even if you read a software patent you might not
realise it covers what you are currently implementing. With patents, we have
to pay money to register them. On the other hand with copyright, everybody of
us even those who just program as a hobby can write a program, and afterwards
this falls under copyright without any additional costs. In fact, software
patents can dispossess us as they can prevent from using the rights we get
from copyright, e.g. to distribute the program to others.

Users would have to pay for all those costs. Some people estimate that the
patent costs for smartphones are about 20% of the actual price payed by the
customer.

Distributed computing at FSCONS

We know that distributed computing is not a brand new topic. In fact there is a
7:21 minutes commercial from 1959 about it,
and some of the ideas might still be relevant for the current "cloud computing"
discussion.

Our part here was to host a track a this year's FSCONS called Divide and
Reconquer , which focused on the problem of the
trend towards centralised non-free Internet services, and possible solutions.
Thanks to Sam's work and our speakers, all
five talks went well, each generating extensive discussion in the question and
answer sessions.

For example this month Fellowship interviewee Brian Gough even said to me after
Michael Christen's demonstration of the peer to peer search engine Yacy, that by the end of next year he only wants to use
distributed search engines for his web searches. Sounds like a good New Year's
resolution. We will continue to work on this topic and animate more people to
think about it, discuss it with others and work on solutions.

Get Active: Buy presents and donate - our support programs

End of the year often means buying presents and donating money. There are some
ways to combine those two things, for example our
support programs. So if you or some of
your friends already use Libri or Amazon to buy presents, please inform them
about the possibility to support us.

If you buy books from bookzilla.de we will receive
around 5% of the sales as a donation.

If you have installed our plugin
around 5% of your sale from amazon is donated to FSFE.